I was reading this article today about William Gallas, the fullback that Arsenal pulled away from Chelsea just before the transfer window closed (what a great replacement for whiner Ashley Cole). The article quotes Arsene Wenger, Arsenal's brilliant coach, who mentioned an article that talks about commonalities between winners. I tracked down the article, and was surprised to find out that the coach who walks on water also reads...

USA Today, the McNewspaper of the US. The article comes from USA Today. Ugh.

Still, I managed to hold my snobbish nose long enough to read the article, and found it useful. What separates the winners (in athletics) from the also-rans? What are the commonalities of winning …

I am glad to see all of the advanced features in MySQL. They all have their place, whether it's making things possible that weren't before, or improving ease-of-use, or improving thru-put and performance. However I find that just because you can use an advanced feature in place of the old way doesn't necessarily mean that you should.

If there are several ways to accomplish the same thing, my first inclination is to go with the one that is simplest to code. My philosophy is that if I arrange the syntax in a logical order with each link in the chain in its proper place, that this will make it that much easier for the server to optimally execute it.

I think that some people will code a subquery in preference to the equivalent join syntax mostly from a basic lack of understanding of how joins work. My personal preference is to code something as a join and avoid use of subqueries wherever possible. If the …

For certain evil purposes last week, I assembled the old Saturn with a hard disk I found when cleaning a little while ago (I have that kind of tech stuff - you clean up and find 40GB disks - I’m pretty sure I have an 8.4 bumming around somewhere too).

I ended up being able to do the evil I needed to, but I could tell that the room was a bit warmer due to the extra box being alive. I was also lazy and couldn’t be bothered going downstairs for the D200, so this was shot with my old and trusty Coolpix 4500.

I used the box to be able to get remote access to a customers’ test setup to do some diagnosis on a bug (that’s notoriously hard to reproduce). I think I have a fair idea of what it is now though (timing related - not fun).

Remember kids, threads are evil.

Also, an interesting thing to …

It's past 7 o'clock in the morning, but this night has been a productive one (hey - no bad thinking please ;-)).

I have updated db4free.net to the latest MySQL 5.1 development source version (5.1.12-beta) and discontinued the 5.0 server. The "former" 5.1 server which ran on port 3307 is still alive, but no new accounts are being created there anymore. During the next days I plan to make the databases that run on the port 3307 server accessible on the main 5.1 server (with standard port 3306) to have everything together on one server - and let the port 3307 server die.

Before the update, most users have only used the 5.0 server, but only a little number of users did anything on the 5.1 server. My intention is to test 5.1 more intensively under a higher load and I hope that this also helps to contribute to the development of MySQL 5.1 by finding bugs or other flaws on a …

It's been some time since I last blogged. I've been quite busy erasing all the
bugs from the partitioning implementation in MySQL 5.1. At the moment
there is 1 bug left in review and a few on its way into the main clone. The
rest of the bugs are fixed and already in the 5.1 clone. So the next 5.1
release (5.1.12) will have partitioning ready for tough tests. So if you have
been waiting for partitioning to stabilise it's time to try it out now with your
application and see how it works.

I watched an interesting animation my daughter made about how partition
pruning using dynamic PowerPoint slides. Really interesting to see what can
be done if one knows how to handle these types of tools. She's quickly
becoming our family authority on presentations.

Lately we've also started working on some extensions for the partitioning
hopefully ready for 5.2. We …

What format do you use to store data during transport?

I had a problem, I needed to pull data from one website system, into another. Where is the data? Its in MySQL, so I decided to skip the API for the system I am exporting the data from and instead just extracted the data from the database (and yes... I will use the API for reinserting the data... I don't want to break the business logic of the new system).

That was an easy decision.

Then I asked myself, what do I store the data in during the conversion? I needed some format because the old web site is not kept on the same system as the new. So I was going to need a flat file for a bit of time.

The first answer that came to mind?

XML!

So for the last couple of weeks I have been thinking about how I was going to design the XML schema. Not putting a lot of thought into this, just jotting down notes in my …

As you might have recognized already, I love to take a look into the Change logs from time to time and hope to find some goodies there. Here's an especially nice one in the Change log of 5.1.12:

INFORMATION_SCHEMA contains new tables, GLOBAL_STATUS, SESSION_STATUS, GLOBAL_VARIABLES, and SESSION_VARIABLES, that correspond to the output from the SHOW {GLOBAL|SESSION} STATUS and SHOW {GLOBAL|SESSION} VARIABLES statements.

This was reason enough for me to compile MySQL 5.1 from source and take a look:

Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 3 to server version: 5.1.12-beta-log

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.

mysql> use information_schema
Database changed
mysql> show tables;
+---------------------------------------+
| Tables_in_information_schema          | …

Okay, so maybe I went a little overboard. But having switched to RSS in order to better interact with the MySQL forums, I seem to have embraced this new way of having content delivered to me whole-heartedly. Of course I added all of the available forum feeds immediately, but then also I added feeds to Planet MySQL as well as some of the constituent blogs directly, also a few NASA blogs and some from family&friends, well, before I knew it the list of feeds has stretched the entire height of my monitor, and I have a 21.3" monitor turned into portrait orientation.

I have to admit, I like staying on top of things and having my feeds polled at 15 minute intervals. I may have to figure …

Here are my slides from my talk at EuroOSCON 2006:

 Being A MySQL Developer, EuroOSCON 2006

Enjoy! 

I’ve had an introductory article to MySQL Cluster 5.1 Disk Data published in the September 2006 issue of International PHP Magazine.

If you’re using Cluster or you’re interested in doing so, and you’ve not yet tried out MySQL 5.1, you’ll find that disk data storage makes MySQL Cluster more flexible, scalable, and cheaper to run than MySQL 4.1 and 5.0 Cluster. In the article, I’ve outlined some reasons why this is so. The article covers the basics of creating disk-based Cluster tables, and discusses some Disk Data do’s and dont’s. There’s also some info about some other improvements to MySQL Cluster that are being made in 5.1, as well as some diagrams and sample PHP5 code for accessing a MySQL Cluster. Just in case you’re not that familiar with setting up a MySQL …